Artisan Pizza — The Kind of Thing You Make When You Finally Stop Being Scared

My daughter Emma is the reason you’re reading this. Let’s get that out of the way.

She’s twelve years old and she thinks I’m funny. She also thinks I’m a good cook, which is objectively true, and that people on the internet would want to hear me talk about food, which is something I’m less sure about. She found this website and said, “Dad, you should write for them. You always have stories about food.” I said, “Nobody wants to hear an old man talk about pork belly.” She said, “You’re not old, you’re forty-one.” Then she helped me sign up, because apparently I can’t navigate a website without a twelve-year-old’s supervision.

So here I am. Bobby Tran. Forty-one years old. Houston, Texas. Restaurant supply salesman by day, backyard pitmaster and accidental Vietnamese cook by night and weekends. Half Vietnamese, half Texan, fully opinionated about how food should taste.

I’ll tell you who I am by telling you about my mother’s pork.

Her name is Mai. She’s seventy-eight years old and she lives in Alief, which is a neighborhood in southwest Houston that has been Vietnamese, Bangladeshi, and Nigerian all at once for as long as I can remember. She came to this country in 1975 on a fishing boat from Saigon. There were forty-some people on that boat. She was seven months pregnant with me. The crossing took eleven days on the South China Sea before a U.S. Navy ship picked them up. My father told me, years later, that she didn’t eat for three of those days — gave her rice to him and my three-year-old sister Linh because there wasn’t enough. She told herself the baby would survive on stubbornness. She was right. I’ve been stubborn my entire life. I consider it a point of pride.

They ended up in a refugee camp in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, then got resettled in Houston. My dad, Huy, had been an accountant in Saigon. Nobody here recognized his credentials, so he washed dishes at a Chinese restaurant on Bellaire Boulevard and didn’t complain once. My mother sewed in a garment factory. They worked sixteen-hour days, saved every penny, and bought a small house in Alief. That house is where I grew up. That house is where my mother still lives. That house has smelled like star anise and charred ginger every Saturday morning for forty years, and I would not change one thing about that.

My mother is a phenomenal cook. I don’t mean good. I mean the kind of cook who could make something out of nothing, who understood that flavors have memory, who was recreating the tastes of a city she’d been forced to leave using whatever she could find at the Fiesta Mart on Bellaire. She made pho from scratch every weekend. She made banh mi with pickled daikon she’d made herself. She made spring rolls with shrimp she’d peeled by hand. And she made thit kho — Vietnamese caramelized braised pork — that I would genuinely trade a lot of things to eat right now.

Thit kho is not a fancy dish. It’s pork belly, hard-boiled eggs, fish sauce, coconut water, and a caramel that you make yourself from sugar in a hot pot. That’s basically it. But the process of making it — the smell of the sugar browning, the sizzle when the pork hits the caramel, the low slow simmer that fills the whole house — that’s a smell I cannot separate from the feeling of being a kid in my mother’s kitchen. She made it on Sunday afternoons, usually while my dad was watching whatever was on television and Linh was doing homework and I was supposed to be doing homework but was instead doing something that would get me in trouble later. The smell would drift through the whole house and it meant everything was okay. Everybody was here. We were safe. We had food.

I didn’t understand what that smell meant to her until I was much older. She’d left her entire previous life on the other side of an ocean — her parents, her sisters, the streets she grew up on, the food she knew. Every dish she cooked was an act of reconstruction. She was building something back from memory, from scraps, from whatever approximations were available. The thit kho she made in Houston wasn’t identical to the thit kho from Saigon — the pork was different, the coconut water was from a can, the eggs were from a grocery store instead of a neighbor’s chickens. But she made it taste like home anyway, because she needed it to, and my mother does not fail at things she needs to do.

I learned to make this dish standing next to her in that kitchen when I was probably nine or ten. She didn’t teach me with measurements. She taught me by watching. “The sugar looks like that,” she’d say, pointing at the pot. “When it looks like that, you put the pork in.” The caramel color was something you learned by ruining it a few times first. She never got upset when I burned it. She just said, “Start again,” and handed me more sugar.

I spent my twenties on shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico, which is a whole other story for another day, and then transitioned to selling restaurant equipment, which I’m still doing. I got married, had three kids, got divorced — also stories for other days, and I’ll get to them when they’re relevant. The short version is that my kids are with me every other week, and the one promise I made to myself when that custody agreement was signed is that when they walk through my door, there is real food on the table. Not delivery. Not frozen pizza. Real food, made with actual effort, the way my mother fed me when everything else in the world was uncertain.

Tyler is fourteen. Emma is twelve. Lily is ten. Last Sunday I made thit kho for all three of them, and I did it the way my mother taught me — low and slow, fish sauce, the homemade caramel, coconut water, eggs that turn a deep amber color after they’ve been sitting in the braise for an hour. I put it over white rice in bowls, the way you’re supposed to, with some of the braising liquid soaked into the rice.

Tyler ate two bowls and went back to his phone. That’s a standing ovation from a fourteen-year-old boy.

Emma, who is the reason you’re reading this, said, “Grandma’s pork.” Not as a question. As a recognition. Like she knew what she was tasting, like the flavor had a name in her memory already. She’s right. It is Grandma’s pork. It was Grandma’s mother’s pork before that, probably. I’m just the guy keeping it from being lost.

Lily asked if we could have chicken nuggets next time. I said yes, because she’s ten and I’m her father, not a dictator. But she did eat the pork first, and she did eat all of it, and I’m counting that as a win.

Here’s what I want you to understand about this recipe before I give it to you: it is not difficult. It looks intimidating because the word “caramelized” is in the name and because it involves fish sauce, which a lot of people in this country are scared of for reasons I don’t fully understand. Fish sauce smells aggressive straight from the bottle. In the dish, it becomes something else entirely — salty and deep and complex in a way that regular salt cannot replicate. My neighbor Mr. Clarence, who was the best BBQ pitmaster I’ve ever met personally, used to say that the best flavors scare you a little before they get good. He was talking about a fire that looked too hot and turned out to be perfect for smoking. He was right about that and he was right about fish sauce, even if he never said so explicitly.

Mr. Clarence died in 2011. He taught my mother how to smoke a brisket. She taught him how to make spring rolls. That trade — in a backyard in Alief in the 1980s, a Black retired postal worker and a Vietnamese refugee showing each other what they knew — is the most Houston thing I can think of, and also maybe the most American thing I can think of. I cooked at his funeral. Two pork shoulders, his recipe. Two hundred people. I think he would have approved.

I miss him. I miss my dad, who died two years ago. I miss the version of myself who ate my mother’s thit kho every Sunday without knowing I was eating something irreplaceable. You never know while it’s happening. You only know after.

So I make it myself now. And when Emma says “Grandma’s pork,” that’s the whole point. That flavor surviving. That flavor reaching the next generation across a kitchen table in a house in Houston, just like it was supposed to.

Stop being scared of the fish sauce. Make the pork. Feed somebody you love.

The recipe I’m sharing this week is artisan pizza — because after everything I just told you about watching people cook with their hands and their hearts, I want you to do the same thing. Pizza is where I learned that simple ingredients, treated right, become something bigger than the sum of their parts. Stretch the dough yourself. Make the sauce from scratch. Put your hands in it. That’s the whole point.

Artisan Pizza

Prep Time: 1 hr | Cook Time: 7 min | Total Time: 1 hr 7 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 1 ball Best Pizza Dough (or Food Processor Dough — or Thin Crust Dough)
• Semolina flour or cornmeal, for dusting the pizza peel
• 1 small garlic clove (1/2 medium)
• 15 ounces crushed fire roasted tomatoes or high quality organic canned tomatoes
• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• Scant 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/4 to 1/3 cup pizza sauce
• 3/4 cup shredded cheese or 2 to 3 ounces fresh mozzarella cheese
• Parmesan cheese
• A few fresh basil leaves

Instructions

1. Prepare the dough. Follow the Best Pizza Dough recipe to prepare the dough. (This takes about 15 minutes to make and 45 minutes to rest.)
2. Preheat the oven. Place a pizza stone in the oven and preheat to 500°F or preheat your pizza oven.
3. Make the sauce. Cut the garlic into a few rough pieces. Place the garlic, tomatoes, olive oil, oregano, and kosher salt in a blender. Blend until fully combined. (You’ll use about 1/3 cup for the pizza; reserve the remaining sauce and refrigerate for up to 1 week.)
4. Prepare the cheese. If using fresh mozzarella cheese, slice it into 1/4 inch thick pieces. If it’s incredibly watery fresh mozzarella (all brands vary), you may want to let it sit on a paper towel to remove moisture for about 15 minutes, then dab the mozzarella with the paper towel to remove any additional moisture.
5. Stretch and place the dough. When the oven is ready, dust a pizza peel with cornmeal or semolina flour. (If you don’t have a pizza peel, use a rimless baking sheet or the back of a rimmed baking sheet. But a pizza peel is well worth the investment!) Stretch the dough into a circle, then gently place the dough onto the pizza peel.
6. Top the pizza. Spread a thin layer of the pizza sauce over the dough, using about 1/4 to 1/3 cup. Add the mozzarella cheese. Top with a thin layer of fresh grated Parmesan cheese and a few pinches of kosher salt.
7. Bake. Use the pizza peel to carefully transfer the pizza onto the preheated pizza stone. Bake the pizza until the cheese and crust are nicely browned, about 5 to 7 minutes in the oven (or 1 minute in a pizza oven).
8. Cool and serve. Allow the pizza to cool for a minute or two before adding the basil on top (whole leaves, lightly torn, or thinly sliced). Slice into pieces and serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 100 | Protein: 5.9g | Fat: 1g | Saturated Fat: 0.2g | Carbs: 16.6g | Fiber: 0.8g | Sugar: 0.6g | Sodium: 128.2mg | Cholesterol: 2.4mg